The Micro Enquirer: Spectrum

Big K

NAMING THE GUILTY MEN Let's kick off this month with a real goodie , Micromania (Sphere, £1.75), for my money the best introductory book available, and certainly the rudest and funniest. Written by Charles Platt (USA) and adapted for Britain by Davin Langford, it sets out to tell 'the whole truth about home computing' and does it with knowledge, wit and style. Aimed mainly at people hovering on the brink of, or with one toe in, the murky waters of the hobby, it manages to put the boot firmly in on virtually every aspect. The chapter on manufacturers ('Naming Names'), is alone worth the price of admission and really shows up books like Tim Hartnell's Personal Computer Handbook'. Commodore get a particularly brutal savaging, but virtually all manufacturers stagger out of the ring covered in blood. Even if you've already taken the plunge, there's plenty of good demystifying gen on, for instance, 'Translating Computer Magazines Into English'. Of course, book s like this always suffer from being a bit out of date, even when revised as this one has been, it doesn't tackle the thorny issue of MSX and went to press before Atari opened the latest price war, for instance. Even so, warmly recommended if only for the jokes. The Micro Enquirer (Century, £8.95) on the other hand has no jokes, is excessively polite about everything and is as boring a book as you could hope to find. It's a format series of which about 90% is standing copy while the rest is specific to the Spectrum, 64, BBC or Atari XL. Put together from material in Another Computer Magazine, there probably is some juuice to be squeezed out of this bland little fruit, but overall it's too tedious for the general reader, and not technical enough serious computer freaks. Putting 'The Indispensible guide to your computer' on a book jacket sounds well OTT, but I must admit that Chris Williamson's Getting the Most Out of Your BBC Micro (Penguin, £5.95) really does live up to it. Very clear, well laid out and to the point, it pulls off that rare trick in computer writing - of treading the thin line between flannel and techno-gibberish, and actually being straightforwardly informative. Apart from picking up where the official 'User Guide' leaves off, it fills in the inevitable gaps. Should be in the box with every Beeb. Building Blocks for BBC Games by Bruce Bayley (Melbourne House, £6.95) has the best printed game listing I've ever seen, beautifully clear with Checksum validations to boot. Unfortunately the games themselves look dull as ditchwater. (The giveaway is the strip on the cover saying 'Electron Compatible'). About a third of the book is actually given over to examining sub-routines, the 'building blocks' of the title, showing the applications of structured programming. Robert Young and Roger Bush, the authors of Games Commodore 64 Computers Play (Addison-Wesley, £6.95) should be published by Melbourne House, if only because they're fellow Aussies. From their biogs they're obviously both heavy duty wargamers, but it doesn't show much in this selection of 19 listings. About half are arcade games, a quarter abstract strategy numbers and the rest adventures or simulations. A pity that Addison-Wesley went for reproducing dot-matrix printouts, which vary from fairly crisp to virtually invisible, because the games sound more interesting than most. I mean Sunnybrook Farm and Roman Empire? Change the ribbon next time, lads. CBM 64 Programs Vol 1 (Duckworth, £6.95), programs by Richard Franklin, edited by Nick Hampshire, suffers, if not quite so badly, from the same problem. A large chunk of the book is devoted to high-res graphics via machine code, with music, utilities, sprites, user-defined characters, a long Star Trek game listing, plus a medieval stag-night adventure and a clutch of smaller games. 'As anyone who has tried to use their Commodore 64 at all seriously will know, the version of BASIC that it is equipped with is not the most advanced version around'. Thus Peter Gerrard introduces, with classic understatement, his Advanced BASIC & Machine Code for the Commodore 64 (Duckworth, £6.95). In his usual thorough style, Gerrard, a really serious 64 man, sets out to go beyond those slow motion PEEKs and POKEs, using an arcade game to introduce the rudiments of machine code programming. Unlike its stable mate above, it boasts crystal clear listings, an excellent appendix of useful information summaries and a proper index.

Sinclair User

WORTHLESS ENQUIRIES Price: £8.95 Publisher: Century Communications The Spectrum version of Micro Enquirer rewritten from old Computer Answers articles, contains aspects of computing which have nothing to do with the Sinclair machine and will be of little interest to Spectrum users'. It is a cheap way of running off titles and the joins show. About ten percent of the information contained within its pages is about the home computer market, the rest being specialist and business sectors. Any Sinclair owners curious about CAD, CP/M, MODULA-2, MS-DOS, MSX and UNIX may find something of interest, but they should pay no attention to the blurb on the cover which proclaims "This book will answer all your questions about your Spectrum..." There is no mention of microdrives or the Interface 1, only a fleeting reference to joysticks and even the photographs are of hardware for other machines.

Read it at Sinclair User Magazine Online

Personal Computer News

Harriet Arnold

'The Micro Enquirer (Spectrum)'' by Benjamin Wooley and Chris Bidmead, published by Century Books, at £8.95 (paperback 183 pages). A team made up of the sometime editor of a magazine with all the answers and one of its contributors should be well qualified to act as micro guides. After all, they know the questions that everyone wants to know the answers to. In fact, articles from past editions of Computer Answers have been cut out, cut up and put through the grinder with permitted additives and colouring. The material consists largely of adapted and updated Spectrum pieces from CA. The book is one of four guides - to the Spectrum,Commodore 64, BBC and Atari XL - all sharing the same encyclopaedic style. Much of the information is also common to all four, leavened with coverage of topics specific to the machine of the title. The text is well presented and the style is eminently readable. Subjects are dealt with in alphabetical order from analogue through to word processor. Sub-sections are headed with a vibrant primrose tint as though someone had gone through with a yellow marker pen, and it colours the plentiful diagrams and listings, too. The routines mean you can learn about your machine by doing things, as well as by reading about them. This is an authoritative, easy to use handbook/reference guide to the Spectrum.